dust
by The Knife
Summary: He grips the chalk hard, bits and pieces of white crumbling within his hand, and he crosses out the circle.


**1 |** chalkzone © nickelodeon  
**2 | **'always' - switchfoot**  
**

* * *

The screeching of new chalk against the chalkboard was just another form of noise, but to Rudy Tabootie, it had called out his name, begging him—_screaming at him_—to come back to his universe behind the board, a childhood dream he had in and even out of bed. He could still clearly remember its name: ChalkZone. It wasn't even all that hard to forget; it was, after all, a zone of chalk.

He ignored the plea as he had done each time, refusing to listen. He carried on with detention—writing "respect" until the word was drilled in his head, and until the whole board was filled up. Detention, they said. For relatively harmless things like sleeping in class and sticking gum under the table—while Reggie got away with truancy and absolutely everything. Rudy would've taken any penalty—except this chalkboard. This was downright _evi__l. _Be forced to hold a piece of chalk and write on the board?

He'd rather clean the whole goddamn school.

_Respect._ The word stung Rudy—he felt he owed unpaid respect to everything he'd forced himself to forget. _Respect._ He had only written the word three times, deliberately enlarging his handwriting and widening the letters to avoid staying in solitary confinement any longer. He put the chalk down and brushed off the dust from his hands and shirt; he didn't want any trace of ChalkZone on him. Before leaving, he took a step back and admired his simplistic piece of work.

A barely audible knock interrupted Rudy's trance. He turned to the door—Penny. She let herself in and stood at his side, eyes briefly scanning the word of the day. "Detention again, huh?" said Penny. "When are you ever going to grow up?"

"Don't... don't say that."

Not hearing his answer, Penny walked to the board and smudged one of the branches of the letter T with her finger. Facing Rudy, she caught him staring vacantly at the chalkboard, a kind of longing seen in his eyes. "Rudy?"

Rudy snapped back to reality—now, there's another word that stings—and shook his head. "What? Something wrong?"

"Well," Penny started, unsure of what to say, but she went on. "It's you, Rudy."

"Me?" said Rudy, a little shocked, a little hurt. He thought about his activity in the past week and found nothing wrong with himself—or his relationship with Penny; they fought every now and then over big things and little things the way normal couples did, but their arguments were nothing serious. _Until now, I guess,_ he muttered under his breath. Rudy shifted his weight around, a little anxious that maybe he'd done something exceptionally stupid this time.

"Lately, you've been blank. You stare at things, mostly the chalkboards, like they're just going to talk to you. I'm just a little worried."

"Oh." Weight shifting. "It's nothing, Penny. Don't worry about it, alright?"

Penny sighed heavily, a little vexed by Rudy unhelpful response at the moment. In the past few days, he had been distancing himself from all his friends, especially her, to spend time with things that had to do with chalk. She could no longer put up with him. "Rudy, I can't be your best friend _or _your girlfriend if you don't tell me what's wrong."

A little hurt that Penny was even using that move on him, Rudy thought it best to give in to her. He paced around the room, feeling Penny's eyes on him. He stopped at the window and scratched his head. "I just don't know what happens to the things I write on the board when I erase them."

"That's it?" said Penny. She rolled her eyes. She had been worried about nothing the whole time. "Rudy, it's a chalk board. You write something, you erase it. The writing disappears."

"You know what I mean, Penny!"

Of course she did. She knew more than anyone besides Rudy himself about his secret world where two-lips grew and childish depictions of clouds hung suspended in pastel blue. How could anyone forget something like that?

Then she just had to know. "Why did you leave ChalkZone?"

For once, Rudy really looked at Penny since she entered the room. Images flashed like a kaleidoscope, adrenaline flowed through his veins, near-death experiences replayed themselves. He shook the memory out of his head. "I just got older, you know?" he said, shrugging. "Drawing crazy kid stuff stopped getting interesting.

"I'm not going to lie. I miss it badly. I miss... I miss Snap and everything."

Penny sat on the armrest of the chair in front of Rudy and balanced herself as not to fall. She thought of Snap, and though he must have looked amazing to them before, she could only remember a crude doodle. "Why don't we go back?" she asked Rudy. "See if he's still around. You know nothing in ChalkZone is ever going to go away. You still have magic chalk, don't you?"

"Just one piece." Rudy dug out the stick of chalk from his pocket. In spite of never having gone back once since his sudden departure, he kept the chalk. Some were scattered around his room, left to slowly erode and become dust as time passed. He had always brought at least one with him wherever he went. Now all he had was this.

Rudy erased some of his writing on the board so that he could draw a portal big enough to fit him and Penny. He started from the top, slowly making his way to finish the first 90 degrees of his perfect circle. His hands were shaking. "I never came back to check on ChalkZone was because I was scared," he admitted while drawing, "of finding out that the place isn't even real, you know?"

"Rudy, I've been there with you," said Penny, hoping her words would reassure him. "Even someone like me knows it's real."

Continuing the portal, Rudy shrugged it off, thinking that maybe Penny herself was just a part of the dreamscape. Another arc. Rudy's heart beat faster, hoping that ChalkZone really was beyond the black, waiting for him with squiggly arms wide open. Waiting for him to come back home to chalk dust and pastel. He could imagine it now, his grand entrance. Snap would be there, blue as ever, with his cheesy grin. "Heya, Rudy!" he would say.

360 degrees. The portal was done with a few imperfections here and there but no gaps were to be seen. Yet it didn't emit the warm light that Rudy had always seen and felt before crossing the border. His hopes of going back home died, and yet, he gave the circle a small smile, an incomplete one. Somehow, he had always known that ChalkZone was just a figment of his imagination. _Fake._

So he gripped the chalk hard, bits and pieces of white crumbling within his hand, and he crossed out the circle.


End file.
